The phenomenal growth in demand for wireless communications has put persistent pressure on wireless network operators to improve the capacity of their communication networks. To improve the spectral efficiency of these networks, scarce radio resources have to be reused aggressively in neighboring cells. As a result, inter-cell interference has become a main source of signal disturbance, limiting not only the service quality to users at the cell edges, but also the overall system throughput.
Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) reception in the uplink is one technique being considered for mitigating inter-cell interference in International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT) Advanced systems. CoMP reception differs from reception in a conventional system in that uplink signals are received at multiple, geographically dispersed base stations, and then sent across backhaul communication links to a common location for joint processing (e.g., to the serving base station). In effect, this architecture forms a “super-cell,” called a CoMP cell, where uplink signals that would have been treated by a conventional cell as inter-cell interference are instead treated by the CoMP cell as desired signals. The mitigation in inter-cell interference is expected to significantly improve system performance, especially for users near the edge of a conventional cell.
Sending the received uplink signals across backhaul communication links for joint processing, however, can require significant and potentially prohibitive backhaul bandwidth. For many transmissions, the coordinating node is under a stringent time deadline to deliver the CoMP payload to the serving node for processing. For example, it is desirable that the uplink signals received by a cooperating node be processed and the CoMP payload delivered to the serving node within the time deadline for Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ). In Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems, the HARQ timing is typically set to 4 ms, so that the HARQ process can assist in exploiting the short term behavior of the wireless channel. Usual solutions deliver the CoMP payload with a latency of less than 500 μs, which allows the payload to be useful to the serving cell within the HARQ deadline. The requirement for low latencies drives the peak data rates on the backhaul and requires very high bandwidth on the backhaul.
The synchronous nature of the cells also contributes to the high peak data rates. Because the transmission in all cells is synchronous, the CoMP payloads from many different nodes may be transmitted over the backhaul at the same time causing peak congestion. The average utilization of the links will be low, while the short peaks drive the bandwidth requirement and link costs.
Processing loads for processing the CoMP payloads is another area of concern. Solutions that minimize the processing load for CoMP operations are advantageous.